The Media Interview

Heard a great story the other day while waiting in the green room at a TV station. Author Sue Johnson (Hold Me Tight) was saying how she once had a 5 minute TV appearance reduced to only 3 minutes because they couldn’t get a tiger off the set from the previous interview.

The plastic surgeon who operated on Kanye West’s mother the day before she died, walked off CNN’s “Larry King Live” during an interview tonight. Larry King opened the hour by saying that it wasn’t clear if Dr. Jan Adams would appear as promised. King said that West’s family had formally asked Adams not to go [...]

Wrestler Chris Jericho was on Fight Network Radio recently to talk about his new autobiography, A Lion’s Tale. I loved his response when asked if he was “sick of media interviews yet”: I’m happy to talk to anybody. I just did an interview with a fourteen-year-old kid that has his own website. And yesterday I [...]

The way NPR’s Bryant Park Project tells it, the Icelandic band Sigur Ros was at fault for what it calls “possibly the worst interview in the history of electronic media”. Seriously. It was that bad. We’re not sure if they were tired, or if it was a language thing, or what… but wow. Whereas most [...]

Having finished a confrontational radio interview, Lowell Massachusetts school committee member, Jackie Doherty attends a breakfast meeting and is introduced to one of the radio station’s owners: We talked about whether radio had to be nasty to attract listeners. He said you can have “provocative” radio without being overly negative (wouldn’t that be something). The [...]

What are people feeling and doing while being interviewed by phone? You can find postings like this one from director Arin Crumley that give you some perspective: CFUN Radio Interview – Arin CrumleyUploaded by Arincrumley Arin and co-director Susan Buice have a good little collection of videos of their phone interviews – it’s a great [...]

It always pays to know at least a bit about the reporter, the show, the blog, the station, etc. before you go into an interview. Here’s how internet marketing expert David Erickson prepped for a recent radio interview: Considering the topic, I did some online research about her and learned a great deal about the [...]

If you do well in a media interview, and you have a wide niche that you can talk about, you might be called on by the media outlet to become a regular guest expert. How does that happen? Well for author Brenda Nixon it went like this: In my hometown of Kansas City, I do [...]

Author Will Weaver on being prepared for unprepared interviewers: My 2 1/2 minute TV interview was with a woman anchor with big hair and pancake make-up, who scanned my novel’s inside cover during a cut-away to a commercial, then returned, on-air, to brightly to ask me questions about the novel –but I know the game, [...]

Don’t you hate when this happens: At one point I said something quoteworthy but the tape wasn’t running, so she asked me to say it again and I think I pulled it off, but I think it sounded better the first time. That’s David Erickson blogging about his experience with a taped-on-location radio interview. The [...]